What separates human accomplishment and failure? In the slinky, seductive “No Danger,” using rhythm as a sign or symbol of desire, Rahsaan Patterson describes love as protection against the cruelty of indifference; but in the song that follows, with a theme of unhappiness, “Pitch Black,” a cross of rock and funk, featuring Patterson’s low voice, a fat slow beat, and guitar feedback, there are “pitch black panic attacks.”
The Elegance of Empathy and Ethics: Be Good by Gregory Porter
On most of the songs on Be Good, Gregory Porter is joined by pianist Chip Crawford, bassist Aaron James, drummer Emanuel Harrold, Kamau Kenyatta on soprano saxophone, Keyon Harrold on trumpet, Yosuke Sato on alto saxophone, and Tivon Pennicott on tenor saxophone. In the mid-tempo, rousing “Mother’s Song,” praise of a mother’s love and lessons, the saxophone is a strong presence, and the percussion sure. The world’s ability to do damage, the sabotage and subterfuge love must face, is the subject of “Our Love,” which has the gospel touch of a bluesy piano.
Lena is the Best: Lena Horne’s album Stormy Weather, featuring “Summertime,” “Mad About the Boy,” “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” with “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and “What’s Right for You (Is Right for Me)”
Miss Lena Horne was one of the great entertainers of the twentieth century. I can recall hearing her name often when I was a boy in the American south, and after I saw her in the western film Death of a Gunfighter (1969), her face haunted me; and I recall as well the excitement she inspired in New York with the 1980s Broadway presentation The Lady and Her Music, the vinyl recording of which I loved (I still remember her saying that she did not want sweet, hard life to pass her by)—and I regret not seeing her at The Supper Club in Manhattan in the 1990s, but I had tickets to see Jeff Buckley around the same time and thought I should not be greedy—I was wrong.
Feeling at One with the World: Van Morrison’s Moondance
The Belfast-born George Ivan Morrison grew up loving jazz and blues recordings; and as a boy Van Morrison learned how to play guitar, saxophone and harmonica, and he quit school to play music, even traveling in Europe, before returning to Belfast, where he started a music club. His band Them achieved some popularity in the mid-1960s, but he was soon performing alone, launching his solo career with “Brown Eyed Girl” in 1967. Morrison created the experimental album Astral Weeks in 1968, and then Moondance in 1970.
Masculine Instrumentality; or, Actions Speak: Accelerando by the Vijay Iyer Trio
Iyer emphasizes music as action; and that fits in with the sense of force the listener hears in the trio’s work. The album cover has a piece of art—it is called “Mother as a Mountain,” a 1985 wood and gesso piece by Anish Kapoor—and it looks like a monumental presentation of a woman’s most private part, but a feminine spirit does not seem to guide the music. Rather, this is very masculine work.
A review of The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
The Bellwether Revivals has been compared to Brideshead Revisited, because of the brother-sister relationship and the social class element. The ending, however, is reminiscent of that of Sons and Lovers, that great coming-of-age working class novel by D.H.Lawrence, following in Thomas Hardy’s tradition.
A review of The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding
There is an intense intimacy in Solding’s writing style. The words come as a confession: a kind of whispered tale that draws the reader in and invites collusion. The characters progress naturally through time, beginning with key moments of youth and awakening perception, and moving through coupling, and later parenthood.
A review of The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb
It’s nothing like the aching devastation witnessed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—to some extent it’s still life as usual in dust-choked Pueblo—but The Bird Saviors might well depict the early days of Cormac’s bleak and terminal catastrophe.
A review of What It Takes to Become a Chess Master by Andrew Soltis
To illustrate the range of the book, one chapter looks very specifically at sacrifices and different kinds of compensation, another at how to aim for decision-friendly positions, where there are clear, straightforward plans and the moves are relatively easy to come by.
A review of First Light by Kate Fagan
The grammatical syntax is also inflected, though not enough to lose the coherency. Instead, the conjunction of familiarity and distortion provides a cognitive dissonance that, mingled with the lovely imagery, is simultaneously pleasing and intellectually tricky.